Month: August 2014

Bobcat Goldthwaite has been one of the most interesting low-budget-independent directors of the past decade, in between his comedy appearances and his frequent television directing work. Sleeping Dogs Lie (2006) and World’s Greatest Dad (2009) both ride their sleazy, cringeworthy premises to conclusions that milk embarrassment for all its worth, and yet also suggest a humane, anti-cynical point of view. God Bless America (2011) is brilliantly on-target political satire, a comedic left-wing detournement of those white-male-rage films that Michael Douglas specialized in in the 1990s. His most recent film, Willow Creek (currently available for streaming, coming out on disc in a month or two) is more straightforward. It’s a “found-footage” horror film in the tradition that started with Blair Witch Project, and has become ubiquitous in recent years. A “creative class” couple, neither particularly sympathetic nor particularly obnoxious, but actually fairly bland, go into the woods of Northern California in search of Bigfoot (of course, they are making a documentary, which motivates the handheld-video-camera footage). It is a slow burn; a lot of mildly diverting banter leads up to a confrontation in the woods, from which (of course) our protagonists do not emerge intact. There is nothing here that departs from what we’d expect from the genre — except that it is so beautifully done. Goldthwaite knows that the true basis of horror filmmaking (or at least of one type of horror filmmaking) lies in two of the most essential properties of the moving-image medium: duration and offscreen sound. There’s a gorgeous formalism here, in the way that so much of the experience of the movie depends on empty time — waiting for something to happen — and on things that can be heard but not seen (the ambiguity of sounds that we more or less recognize, but whose source we cannot quite identify). Most astonishing of all in Willow Creek is a 19-minute-long single take with motionless camera: a shot of the two main characters, sitting up in their sleeping bags inside their tent, listening to and reacting to things that go bump in the night. It’s great horror filmmaking, building a sense of slowly accelerating dread. But I will go further and say that it is at the same time a superior example of, and a brilliant riposte to, all that international-art-house-style “slow cinema” people have been pontificating about in recent years.